“We are more apt to make a grasping gesture when we speak of grasping an idea than when we speak of grasping a doorknob.” Benjamin Lee Whorf 1
People rountinely gesture, both in conversation with others and when thinking by themselves.2
Gestures can be metaphorical, representing non-spatial attributes with spatial attributes, and some are analogical, representing non-spatial relations with spatial relations.3
Within-subjects (2 x 2 x 3)
(Blocked by problem type and axis with difficulty pseudorandomly interleaved.)
Visualizations
After the experimenter left the room, participants solved 40 linear syllogisms, blocked by trial type (n = 24).
Each syllogism was presented for 10 seconds.
Participants solved each problem by saying “yes” if true, “no” if false, and “can’t tell” if invalid.
Data of participants was coded for response accuracy, gesture presense, and axis of gesturing.
Waffleplots not rendering (shown as image).
Spatial trials were more likely to elicit gesture (p = .002).
Trial axis did not affect gesture production (p = .14; not shown).
As Page Piccinini and others have pointed out, barplots can hide the distribution of data!
Page suggests we abandon barplots in favor of boxplots.
Boxplot more clearly shows the distribution.
Datapoints seem unnecessary in this case: they do not further reveal the data and overlap at the extremes.
More gestures were produced when spatial relations are presented before abstract relations.
However, more gestures were produced in the spatial condition even when non-spatial relations were presented first.
library(igraph)
library(ggraph)
dendrogram <- as.dendrogram(hclust(dist(iris[, 1:4])))
ggraph(dendrogram, 'dendrogram') +
geom_edge_elbow()
ggraph(dendrogram, 'dendrogram', circular = TRUE) +
geom_edge_elbow() +
coord_fixed()
dendro_data <- level_01_data %>%
select(SPACE_IV, AXIS_IV, DIFF_IV)
dendro_study_design <- as.dendrogram(hclust(dist(dendro_data)))
ggraph(dendro_study_design, 'dendrogram') +
geom_edge_elbow()
ggraph(dendro_study_design, 'dendrogram', circular = TRUE) +
geom_edge_elbow() +
coord_fixed()Whorf, B. L. (1944) The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language. Etc: A Review of General Semantics, 1(4), 197–215.↩
e.g., Kita, S., Alibali, M. W., & Chu, M. (2017). How do gestures influence thinking and speaking? The gesture-for-conceptualization hypothesis. Psychological Review, 124(3), 245–266.↩
Cooperrider, K., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2017). When Gesture Becomes Analogy. Topics in Cognitive Science, 9(3), 719–737.↩